> The leveraged loans are now being packaged into collateralized loan obligations and sold to investors. Sound familiar? And the CLO market has grown to match t

> The leveraged loans are now being packaged into collateralized loan obligations and sold to investors. Sound familiar? And the CLO market has grown to match the size of the CDO market at its pre-crisis peak. Yet one major difference makes the CLOs of today less scary: The loans that comprise them are backed by collateral, and if one of the companies in the mix defaults, an investor can find recourse through the sale of that collateral. Pre-crisis CDOs built on mortgage-backed securities had no such backstops. Wait, what's the difference here? Mortgages had collateral- the homes. That's the C in CDO. The problem was that when home prices fell, the collateral wasn't enough to cover the loan defaults. It seems like the same thing could happen for a structured product based on other types of debt if the collateral turns out to not be as valuable as we thought.